


Family Matters

by atamascolily



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: New Republic Era - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Force Ghosts, Gen, One Shot, Plot Twists, Skywalker Family Feels, Why Didn't You Tell Me?, from a certain point of view
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 13:32:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14285991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atamascolily/pseuds/atamascolily
Summary: When a gene test reveals some disturbing results in the aftermath of the Battle of Endor, a serious talk with Obi-wan's ghost is in order.





	Family Matters

Luke's not sure why he decides to do the gene test - maybe he just wants tangible proof of his heritage as opposed to the ramblings of an unreliable ghost - but the results, when they come in, leave him reeling. 

Obi-wan lied, again. Leia's not his full sister, she's his half-sister. They have the same mother, but different fathers. After Ghent slices into the Emperor's secret files (the kid was high on the resulting adrenaline rush for _weeks_ afterward), Luke runs Vader's DNA as well, to see if that was a lie, too. The additional testing confirms his initial suspicions: Luke is Vader's child, and Leia isn't. 

Leia is relieved, of course. She's happy to have Luke as her brother-by-blood as well as a brother-by-choice (there are words for the family you choose in High Alderaani that she whispers sometimes under her breath when she thinks no one can hear her), but she's never accepted Vader as her father, never been able to forgive him for the atrocities he committed, the tortures he put her through. Now she doesn't have to. Vader was a monster, but he's not _her_ monster, not anymore. She's free, and so are her children, from Vader's taint, Vader's legacy. 

"I'm sorry, Luke," she says, though they both know it's not her fault, was never her fault. What she means is, _I'm sorry you're alone in the world, orphaned again_ , even though "orphan" is foreign concept in Alderaani society, where no one is ever truly alone, except by choice. It's real to Luke, though, and she respects that, even as she tries to draw him back into the secure familial web she's woven with Han and the children. 

"Obi-wan told me we were twins, separated at birth," Luke says slowly, heavily, the words thick and ponderous on his tongue. "I don't understand why he lied. Again. _Again_." 

Leia wrinkles her nose, thinking. "Maybe he was hiding something?" 

"But _why_?" 

"Maybe there was something he was ashamed of--something he couldn't admit to you, even at the end. So he told the truth - from a certain point of view. That was his strategy before, wasn't it?" 

She's right, of course. Why did he think it would ever be any different? That Ben might actually tell him the _truth_ , full stop, for once.

"But Yoda _told_ me there was another Skywalker with his dying breath! Why would _he_ lie to me?" Yoda had been skilled at ducking and evading troublesome questions, or offering complete but ambiguous answers when cornered, but Luke had never known him to lie outright. 

Something's off, but is it his teachers or the gene test? He made the the techs run the scans over and over again, just to be sure, but the results are always the same. 

The old refrain launches in his mind: " _Ben... Ben... why didn't you tell me?"_ Only this time, there's a twist: _Why DID you tell me that Leia and I were twins if we weren't? What the hell are you hiding?_

"I can still feel the Force, though," Leia says, still thinking through the implications. "So our mother must have been Force sensitive as well?" 

Their shared mother. The woman who Leia can just barely remember, and Luke can't. He clenches his fist in frustration and anger at the injustice. Ben says she died giving birth to them, but that's another lie, it has to be. Leia is slighly younger than Luke, which means that someone - Ben, probably - took Luke away from his mother and brought him to Tatooine. Luke hopes it was Ben, because the thought of being abandoned by his mother - even if it was to keep him safe and hidden from Vader - is like an attack from a womp rat hive - a slow, gnawing, painful death by a thousand pointed incisors packed with paralyzing neurotoxins. 

"I'm going to have to talk to him," Luke decides, not realizing he's spoken aloud until he glimpses Leia's startled expression. 

But to his surprise, she doesn't try to talk him out of it. "How are you going to do that? Hold a seance?" She's not laughing at him, but he can tell she appreciates the absurdity of their situation, and hopes that he sees it, too. 

He does, but it's not enough to stop him. "I have an idea," he says, and stalks out, eager to put it into practice before she can stop him. 

***

Meditation is probably the best way to go about communing with the dead, but of course Luke is too angry and impatient to go the sensible route. Instead, he falls back on the tried and true method of throwing himself into dangerous situations and hoping his ghostly mentor will intervene in the nick of time. It's not quite as suicidal as it looks, but as Luke eyes the railing on the roof of the old Imperial Palace, he admits that the security camera footage of what's coming next will not advocate his usual levels of mental stability (assuming, as Leia will acidly point out when she learns of this, that Luke was ever mentally stable at all). 

He backs up, scuffing his feet against the roof, and wondering what creative spin the HoloNet will put on this if he dies after all. Then he sweeps the troublesome thoughts out of his mind the same way he would sweep the sand out of his childhood bedroom on Tatooine - forcefully, and all at once, with the aid of a broom bigger than he was. _Do or do not. There is no try,_ as Yoda always said. 

Very well. He's not trying. He's doing this. 

_Ready or not, here I come--_

He sprints towards the far side of the roof, muscles tensing in anticipation as he nears the railing, poising to vault himself over the thick strands of metal and wire, and let gravity carry him down, down, down, towards the streaming landspeeder traffic several hundred stories below--

\--and just when he's about to leap, he trips over his own feet, and plows headfirst into the railing, which has been heavily fortified to prevent people from doing exactly what Luke is trying to do right now. He bounces back, and slams into the ground, _hard_ , and the edges of the world grow fuzzy for a while. It takes him a few minutes to force himself upright, when he realizes that some of the fuzziness isn't brain damage after all, it's the ghostly specter of Obi-wan Kenobi, a profound look of disappointment on his face. 

Luke doesn't care. Now that his plan has worked, he doesn't mince words. "Okay, Ben, why the _hell_ did you lie to me about Leia on top of everything else?" 

"She _is_ your sister," Ben says coolly, playing with the edge of his robe. 

"Half-sister. You told me we were twins." 

"From a certain point of view--" 

"Don't give me that bullshit, Ben! Yes, metaphorically, we make a better set if we're twins. Yes, it's archetypally brilliant. Yes, she can use the Force, and she'd've been just as vulnerable to Vader and the Emperor if they'd gotten their hands on her once the secret was out, but _she is not my twin sister_ and you _lied_ to me again, and I'm _tired_ of it." 

The words pour out in a tirade, and he doesn't care if he's calm and settled and at peace and all that other Jedi crap; he regrets none of this. 

Ben, of course, just lets Luke tire himself out in an angry stream of invectives and insults of varying degrees of creativity (though he raises an eyebrow when Luke uses a particularly coarse and inventive Tatooine slur that implies that the old man was on intimate terms with an entire bantha herd). Only when Luke is too exhausted to continue ranting does he speak again. 

"It's true, I have not been completely honest with you, Luke, but you must understand. In life, I had many failings - most notably, in training my student Anakin Skywalker, but there were others. After Anakin turned to the Dark Side and became Darth Vader, your mother and I went into hiding together. She gave birth to you not long afterwards, and in due time I took you to live with your father's brother Owen on Tatooine, where you would be safe. What I didn't know was that she was pregnant again with your half-sister Leia when I left her. And, as you have already gathered, Vader was not her father." 

It's so blindingly _obvious_ in retrospect, he's amazed he hadn't seen it sooner. Leia, as usual, got it exactly right: " _Maybe he was hiding something... something he was ashamed of--something he couldn't admit to you, even at the end. So he told the truth -- from a certain point of view._ " 

" _You_ ," he breathes. "It was _you_!" 

Obi-wan nods slowly. "Indeed," he said. "Your mother died after giving birth to Leia. I learned of her death, but I did not know of your sister's existence until the very end of my life, and even then, I did not have proof, I only suspected. It was not until afterwards that certain things were... made clear to me.

"I must beg your forgiveness, Luke. After my failures with him, I assumed in my arrogance and pride that the only way to stop Vader was to destroy him utterly. I told you what I thought you needed to hear to motivate you to stand against him." 

"It worked," Luke says, rubbing his temple, wishing he could chalk this entire conversation up to brain damage. "Almost too well, actually. I nearly fell to the Dark Side myself when he saw my feelings for her in my mind and taunted me with them." 

Ben sighs. "I have never claimed to be wise, Luke. Pity an old man and his failings. I thought that two decades of exile in the desert would be sufficient atonement." 

"That's where you went wrong. You can't atone for mistakes by hiding from them. You atone by facing up to them and doing your best to make amends." 

How does he dare to correct his old mentor? He's older now, and not so easily cowed by a few tantalizing scraps of family history and some Force tricks, that's part of it. But he's also tired. Tired of being lied to. Tired of Obi-wan's mistakes and emotional immaturity coming to back to bite him on the ass. 

Obi-wan stares at him, meeting his eyes for a few heartbeats before turning away. "You are right, Luke. Right again, and I was wrong." 

And then, in a horrifying echo of Vader's last words: "Please, tell your sister - that you were right." 

And just like that, he's gone wherever ghosts go when they aren't chatting with the living. 

Luke collapses back on the ground again, and sobs until there are no more tears left. For himself, for Leia, for the fathers they never knew, and the sins that left them all strangers to each other. No one asked for this, least of all Luke, but here they are, with no choice to accept what is exactly as it is. 

The other Skywalker that Yoda spoke of on his deathbed - wasn't Leia at all. It never had been. It was Anakin, all along. _Pass on what you have learned_ , Yoda said. And Luke had done just that, guiding his father back to the light just in time - without even realizing it.

Life would be easier with the Force, he thinks, not for the first time. His abilities make him special and have saved him countless times now, but they also set him up for new and unique forms of torture, like this one. For Luke, the cruel irony is that death doesn't stop people like Ben from hurting him - it only amplifies the pain. 

Eventually, he passes out. 

***

Leia senses he's in trouble, and calls a medical squad when she finds him unconscious and alone on the rooftop. "Did you try to kill yourself?" she says as soon as he's awake and alert enough to answer, sprawled out in the VIP security wing of the best hospital on Coruscant. 

"No," he says, because it's true, but she doesn't believe him. "I held a seance, like you suggested." 

"I didn't realize that a seance involved throwing yourself against the railing like that." 

Luke winced. So she _had_ seen the security footage. Damn. He sighed, and braced himself for a tongue-lashing. "I wanted to talk to Ben, and the best way to summon him was to put myself in danger." 

But to his surprise, she nods. "On the footage, it looked like you were talking to someone. The security techs couldn't see anything, but I thought I saw a very faint outline that might have been a person. Was it--" 

"Yes."

"And?" 

"He says he's your father." 

A long pause. A _very_ long pause, while Leia considers this. "Oh," she says at last. "Well, that explains a lot." 

"Do you feel better now?" 

She leans over to embrace him. "Luke, this isn't about me. It's never been about me at all. I already had the father I always wanted. You never did. So tell me - do _you_ feel better now?" 

Now it's his turn to mull over her words, cautiously examining each tendril of emotion as it flares up within him, letting the negative ones spill away into oblivion as his attention drifts away from them. 

"Right now, I feel like hell," he says at last. 

"Head injuries will do that to you," she agrees, smiling despite herself.

"But I think--I think I'm going to be just fine." 

She's right. She's always been right. The only family that matters is the one you choose.

"Good," she says. "I missed you. Welcome home."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a sucker for the theory that the "there is another" speech in Empire Strikes Back, actually refers to the possibility of Anakin Skywalker's redemption, not Leia as a potential back-up savior. In this AU, that's exactly what happened.


End file.
